“Goodbye / Goodnight”: Making Sense of Ethnographic Exits Through Classroom Rituals

• In Event: Writing (Righting) Ethnographic Exits: Methodological Insights on Leaving the Field from Elementary Literacy Researchers

Abstract

Engaging deeply in ethnographic fieldwork means coming to understand how one becomes a member of a community and what it means for a member to leave. My writing/research has focused on exploring longitudinal literacy processes involved in children entering and leaving the classroom community, but in this presentation I examine my own process of “exiting the field” as a way to contribute methodologically to an overlooked part of the research process (Delamont & Smith, 2023) and to generate reflexive insights around children’s understanding of and beliefs about leaving.

Rather than an individually-determined, rational process, my “ethnographic exit” (Delamont & Smith, 2023) involved participating in shared community rituals. Whereas routines offer the reassurance of predictability, rituals offer a set of special (inter)actions, objects/artifacts, and words (spoken and written) for navigating events and transitions as a family/community, attaching meaning, significance, and/or symbolism beyond the action or experience itself (Deal & Peterson, 1999; Gehrke, 1979; ). The importance of rituals as part of children’s life at home has been well documented (e.g., Fiese et al., 2002), but more limited work has explored the role of rituals in schools (e.g., Gillespie & Peterson, 2012; LeBlanc, 2017), and, of interest here, the role of rituals in helping researchers navigate ethnographic exits.

Leveraging theory as a tool for thinking about/with data (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011), Imber-Black and Roberts’s (1992) framework of how rituals work (i.e., their purposes) was used to understand how classroom (inter)actions functioned as rituals to mark and make sense of leaving, and the ways my own participation in these rituals served to mediate my ethnographic exit.

The data analyzed for this paper was generated as part of a four-year longitudinal ethnography in a K-6 multiage classroom (50 students; 2 teachers) in a public school. The focal data sources for this presentation included student-/community-produced artifacts and student-elevated texts (e.g., songs) that served primary roles in enacting end-of-year rituals. Given that rituals have embodied and affective qualities, fieldnotes from the final two weeks in the classroom (May 14-28, 2014) were also used. Finally, my own previous writing about the end of my fieldwork was analyzed in terms of what it hid/obscured or might now illuminate about my own ethnographic exit in light of this new theoretical framing.

Ultimately, rituals ‘‘hold individuals and groups together’’ (Greenman, 1998, p. 122), helping this classroom community make sense of their world collectively and offering particular ways of talking, acting, and, importantly, writing/composing in the world. Conversely, rituals help individuals–including ethnographers/researchers–navigate the process of exiting by formally and collectively making sense of and marking transitions/changes (i.e., the “changing” function (Imber-Black & Roberts, 1992)).

Participating in classroom rituals can help researchers “mark what [the community] value[s] as most important” (Neugbauer, 2000, p. 49) and provides a shared space for collectively experiencing the emotions inherent in major life-cycle transitions like the end of fieldwork.

Author

• Beth A. Buchholz, Appalachian State University